Active Reading: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Annotating sources can be helpful in connecting with and understanding the piece you are reading. It is a very helpful tool to engage with the source. However, I never found that annotating sources helped me in my writing process. In the past and now I haven’t ever used annotating as a tool in my process. It helps me stay focused and understand the essay, but I didn’t find myself using my annotations directly or indirectly in my essays or reading responses. The reading responses however did help directly in my writing process. I used the reading responses as a note sheet. I was able to use the responses as a place to write down quotes that I would go on to use in my essay. Below is a paragraph from the “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen reading response.

Work Sample 1: Paragraph from Chen reading response.

Work Sample 2: Body paragraph from Essay 1.

When I began writing essay 1 I started my draft with a list of quotes I may want to use. I went through my reading response and the essay itself to find quotes to build my essay around. I was able to take this quote and use it in my essay then build a paragraph off of it.

Work Sample 3: Response to question 1 from the DFW reading response.

This reading response helped me tremendously with the second essay. When starting that essay I struggled with figuring out how to state my point and which side I was going to take. I was very confused on how I was going to consolidate my thoughts on empathy and how I was going to use the sources to strengthen my ideas. This response helped me piece together my ideas and allowed me to focus on which parts of DFWs essay I was going to pull quotes from.